The Geek Beat: Here Are Three Fake News Stories We Wish Were Real

Oh, April Fools' Day, you are a bittersweet pill. When I was a news editor, I despised the annual flood of faux announcements and prank projects that came crashing into my professional life the last day of March and made a mess out of the usual news cycle. But as a media consumer, I get no small amount of entertainment from the ridiculous stories that pop up online during the 24-36 hours surrounding April 1.

While I'm glad some of those fake stories have proved to be exactly that (Lady Gaga playing Dazzler in X-Men: Days of Future Past comes to mind), there have been more than a few that I wished were true – like last year's widely circulated article about a working Iron Man suit for sale in the U.K. And those have always been my favorite products of the April Fools' Day madness.

With that in mind, I've come up with a few stories that I'd like to see pop up in my newsfeed – if only to spend a few more minutes thinking about how great it would be if they became a reality.

Legendary Pictures Announces Plans For Godzilla/Pacific Rim Crossover

Not content to let Disney and Warner Bros. have all the fun with their respective comic book universes, Legendary Pictures announced today that it will bring together cinema's “King of all Monsters” and the giant robots of Guillermo del Toro's monster-fighting epic Pacific Rim in an upcoming film that establishes a unified narrative universe for two of the company's biggest sci-fi properties.

In announcing the project, the studio acknowledged the difficulty of bringing together the worlds of the two films, which each suffer catastrophic damage as a result of their respective monsters, but hinted that certain plot elements in either 2013's Pacific Rim or the upcoming Godzilla reboot could allow for the cross-pollination of characters. With del Toro's film making it clear that little is known about the mysterious portals that allowed the monstrous Kaiju to enter our world, those portals could be one of the aforementioned, crossover-friendly plot elements.

Thanks to Pacific Rim's impressive overseas box office revenue (which made up for the film's poor performance in the U.S.), del Toro's vision for a world in which humans fought giant monsters using massive robots was given a second lease at life on the big screen, and the performance of Godzilla at the box office will likely go a long way toward determining how soon this project goes into production.

Of course, along with the world-spanning crossover element, the project's writers will also need to contend with some potential scale issues, as all signs point to the title character in Godzilla being quite a bit larger than the Kaiju of Pacific Rim. In the end, though, fans of both properties will likely agree that these are good problems to have.

Following on the heels of the green-lit sequel to Captain America: The Winter Soldier and its habit of generating buzz through title announcements, Disney announced today that not only has a sequel to the upcoming Guardians of the Galaxy received official approval, but it already has a title, too.

The follow-up to this year's adventure through the cosmic side of Marvel's cinematic universe will be titled Guardians of the Galaxy: Wraith War, and anyone who recognizes the alien species referenced in the title is certainly wondering about the greater implications of this title on the Marvel universe.

The shape-changing Dire Wraiths were first introduced in the debut issue of Rom, a long-running series that was initially conceived as a tie-in for a toy but ended up becoming far more popular than the product that spawned it and ran for 75 issues. The series chronicled the adventures of a cyborg “Spaceknight” named Rom who arrived on Earth in pursuit of the evil Dire Wraiths, who had infiltrated the planet and were grooming it to be their next conquest in a bloody cosmic invasion.

While the Wraiths have popped up periodically in various series since the conclusion of Rom in 1986, the title character itself remains tied up in legal limbo due to rights issues and has been conspicuously absent from recent cosmic events in the Marvel Comics universe. The announcement of Wraith War is likely to bring fresh attention to the popular character's uncertain status, and prompt some questions about whether the Guardians of the Galaxy sequel could serve as Rom's “Welcome Back” party – or at the very least, bring Rom's cyborg pals to the big screen along with their enemies.

Unbreakable 2 Confirmed for 2015

The film that's widely regarded as one of the first “dark” superhero stories to hit the big screen will finally gets its sequel, 14 years after it premiered.

Production on the sequel to M. Night Shyamalan's Unbreakable will begin later this year, according to today's announcement from Touchstone Pictures. Bruce Willis and Samuel L. Jackson will reprise their roles from the original film, which chronicled the story of security guard David Dunn (Willis), who discovers that he possesses superhuman powers.

Originally released in 2000, Unbreakable was a modest success and achieved a cult following due to its mature take on the modern superhero story, and is often credited with helping to usher in the modern age of “dark,” serious superhero movies produced with adult audiences in mind. In the official statement announcing the Unbreakable sequel, the studio indicated that the sequel will be set well after the events of the original film, and will follow Willis' character as he learns more about his powers and the responsibility that comes with them.

While the announcement confirmed Jackson's return as brilliant-but-frail villain Elijah Price, the studio also hinted that the sequel will introduce a new villain that will test the limits of David's abilities and make him question whether he's the only one of his kind in the world.

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And along with those three stories, here are a few more in headline form that I'd love to see – or better yet, to see become a reality:

Guillermo del Toro Attached to BioShock: The Movie

Condorman Remake to Begin Filming in 2015

Live-Action Voltron Gets First Teaser Poster and 2016 Release Date

And that's it! See you next week, and remember: Don't believe everything you read in the news today!

Question of the Week: What headlines would you like to see in your news feed, even if they're fake?

Rick Marshall is an award-winning writer and editor whose work can be found at Movies.com, as well as MTV News, Fandango, Digital Trends, IFC.com, Newsarama, and various other online, print, and on-air news outlets. He's been called a “Professional Geek” by ABC News and Spike TV, and his personal blog can be found at MindPollution.org. You can find him on Twitter as@RickMarshall.

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